FSFE Newsletter - December 2011

Your own web search - version 1.0

Who controls what you find on the internet? Search engines are a vital
connection between you and information. In the eyes of the FSFE, it is important that users can
be independent. That is why we spread awareness about the 1.0 release of YaCy,
a peer-to-peer search engine. Read about YaCy at
our press release, Karsten
Gerloff's blog entry or choose one of the many
news sites who wrote about it, including Wall Street Journal, BBC News,
The Telegraph or TAZ.

Dutch government hands over education's keys to Microsoft

The Dutch government wants to tie the country's schools to a single software
vendor for years to come. Dutch students using Free Software or devices without
support for Silverlight will find themselves locked out of schools' online systems
due to the use of proprietary technology and closed standards. Marja
Bijsterveldt, the secretary of education, recently said that she is unwilling
to enforce the Dutch government's own Open Standards policy on educational
institutions. Instead, the government will accept long-term vendor lock-in of
educational institutions.

With our campaign, FSFE's
volunteers in the Netherlands want to enable all
citizens to have free access to education and all other publicly-funded
institutions, both online and offline, by pushing for a mandatory use of Open
Standards and a guaranteed platform-independent access to all online
environments. This would allow students and their parents to use Free Software, and in
that way enable them to tap into their potential for growth and personal
development.

Our current success rate: 511 out of 2081 (24%) reported public websites
have removed the non-free software advertisement. 1938 individuals, 58
organisations and 56 businesses have signed the petition.

And
Nikos Roussos argues: Free Software web applications are not not just
the future, but they are also cool.

Get active: Ensure it is Secure Boot, not Restricted Boot!

Microsoft has announced that if computer makers distribute machines with the
Windows 8 compatibility logo, they will have to implement a measure called
"Secure Boot." This measure is meant to increase security on your computer,
but we are very concerned that hardware manufacturers will implement these boot
restrictions in a way that will prevent you from booting any other operating
system than Microsoft Windows. That is why we ask you for help:

Sign the
statement yourself, and ask your family, friends, colleagues to do the
same.

Currently 20,562 people have signed the statement, making it clear they want to have
the choice. We need more signatures to send a clear signal to hardware vendors that
they have to enable us to install Free Software on our
computers.